Necessity for quantum coherence of nondegeneracy in energy flow

Abstract

In this work, we show that the quantum coherence among non-degenerate energy subspaces (CANES) is essential for the energy flow in any quantum system. CANES satisfies almost all of the requirements as a coherence measure, except that the coherence within degenerate subspaces is explicitly eliminated.We show that the energy of a system becomes frozen if and only if the corresponding CANES vanishes, which is true regardless of the form of interaction with the environment. However, CANES can remain zero even if the entanglement changes over time. Furthermore, we show how the power of energy flow is bounded by the value of CANES. An explicit relation connecting the variation of energy and CANES is also presented. These results allow us to bound the generation of system-environment correlation through the local measurement of the system's energy flow.